In 2029, a resistance unit seeks to destroy Skynet's vital data control tower.

 

Story Summary

 

A resistance unit attacks the vital Skynet data control tower. They carry a young woman with bone cancer, unable to use her legs. A Terminator pursues them up the wall of the control tower and kills the soldiers, leaving the unarmed woman for interrogation. But she is outfitted with a plastic explosive that won't show up on initial scans. As the Terminator begins to interrogate her at the top of the tower, she turns up the volume on the music player connected to the headphones she wears which drown out the sounds of war and the screams of her dying comrades. The volume control triggers the explosive and the tower comes down.

 

Notes from the Terminator chronology

 

The first page of this story indicates it takes place in 2029. Additionally, page 6 implies it takes place before the death of Lt. Stamford in "Death Valley" Part 1 (which is why I have placed it at this point in the chronology).

 

Didja Know?

 

This is a 10-page black-and-white comic book story that first appeared in Dark Horse Presents #138.

 

Didja Notice?

 

On page 1 of the story, Ali's narrative refers to the smell and hot crackle of arc-guns. I've been unable to determine exactly what an arc-gun is, either inside or outside the Terminator universe.

 

Despite being a tank with a wheeled, continuous tread, the Skynet attack machine on page 2 refers to itself as a "hover-killer".

 

On page 6, Ali's narrative states that Connor's trusted lieutenant, Stamford, sent her and her group to destroy Skynet's data control tower. Stamford is presumably a reference to Lt. Martin Stamford, who later commits suicide rather than expose what he knows of John Connor's history in "Death Valley" Part 1.

 

    On page 8, Ali's narrative indicates her parents got caught in the fallout from the nukes dropped on Burbank "fifteen years ago," resulting in her having uranium in her genes and strontium-90 in her bones, resulting in her soon-to-come death from bone cancer in mere weeks.

    Since the "current" year is stated at the beginning of the story as 2029, this tells us that nukes were dropped on Burbank in 2014. Is this also Judgment Day in this timeline? Or just a later date that Skynet chose to drop additional nuclear bombs on a human population?

    Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County.

    Uranium is known to cause mutagenic effects on DNA and strontium-90 is known to deposit itself mostly in bone and bone marrow in living organisms, leading to bone cancer, leukemia, and other types of cancers.

 

The Terminator that pursues Ali and her group appears to have a gun mounted to its forearm.

 

On page 9 of the story, one of the resistance soldiers protecting Ali has to blast through what he calls "plexi-glaz". Presumably, he is referring to a variation or brand name of Plexiglas, the trademark name of transparent thermoplastic of polymethyl methacrylate made by the Rohm and Haas Company, now owned by Dow Chemical.

 

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